Blue Velvet Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

I wanted to make a cake for my friend Alana’s “Galaxy Quest”-themed party, so of course I wanted it to be blue. Red velvet cake is my favorite cake of all cakes, so I decided to try to make a blue velvet cake instead and see how it turned out. I used an angel food cake recipe for the base and added a tablespoon of cocoa powder in an attempt to keep the cake from turning greenish from the egg yolks in normal red velvet recipes. Because of the angel food base, the cake turned out with a much lighter flavor than red velvet, which is usually super rich. I also threw some blueberries into the actual cake for some juicy baked blueberry flavor bombs. Plus, the intense purple speckles inside the cake from the fresh blueberries look really lovely when you slice into it, too!

Tips for the Best Blue Velvet Cake

This recipe uses an angel food cake base, which means beating a lot of egg whites until they stiff and then folding the dry ingredients into them.

You have to fold the dry ingredients in a little at a time, and very carefully. Do not stir, it will puncture the air bubbles and the cake will be flat and gummy instead of light and airy.

If you don’t know how to fold ingredients into beaten egg whites, this video is pretty helpful.

This angel food-based blue velvet cake also has a delicious cream cheese frosting all over it. I tend to like my cream cheese frosting a little less sweet and a little more tangy, but fi you find it’s not sweet enough you can feel free to add another tablespoon or two of powdered sugar to it. Just make sure to beat the icing long enough for it to get light and fluffy, which takes about 5 minutes. It’s also key to use butter and cream cheese that are at room temperature. If you use them chilled, they’re too hard and stiff and they won’t blend together smoothly.

Blue Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This blue velvet cake has an angel food base with fresh blueberries baked into the cake, and is coated in a delicious and creamy cream cheese frosting.

Course
Dessert

Keyword
blue velvet cake

Prep Time35minutes

Cook Time40minutes

Cooling Time1hour

Total Time1hour15minutes

Servings12people

Calories406kcal

AuthorEva Kosmas Flores

Ingredients

Blue Velvet Cake

1.25Cups Cake Floursifted

1.25Cups Ultra-Fine Sugar

11Egg Whitesroom temperature

2TeaspoonsVanilla Extract

.25ouncesBlue Food Coloring

1.5teaspoonsCream of Tartar

1TablespoonCocoa Powder

1/4TeaspoonSalt

1.5cupsBlueberriesfresh not frozen

Cream Cheese Frosting

7.5tablespoonsunsalted buttersoftened

12ouncescream cheesesoftened

2.25cupspowdered sugar

3Teaspoonsvanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. In a medium-sized bowl, sift together the flour, 1/2 cup of the sugar, and the cocoa powder.

In a large bowl, beat together the egg whites, vanilla extract, cream of tartar and salt until they begin to hold soft peaks. Then beat in the remaining 3/4 cups sugar and the blue food coloring until the mixture begins to hold stiff peaks, about 4 minutes or so.

Slowly fold in 1/4 cup of the flour mixture at a time. Use a spatula and take care not to stir the mixture, just keep folding until all of the flour mixture is incorporated. Pour one cup of blueberries into the batter and fold them in as well. Pour the batter into two well-greased 9-inch cake pans and bake in the oven for about 20-30 minutes.

While the cake is baking, make the Cream Cheese Frosting. Mix the cream cheese, vanilla and butter together until they are completely combined. Add the powdered sugar and mix until blended. Refrigerate for 15 minutes to help solidify the texture.

Once the cake is done, remove it from the oven and allow to cool for about 15 minutes. Shake the pan a little bit to loosen the grip of the cake, then place a plate on top of the pan and, wearing oven mitts, flip it over so that the pan is on the top and the plate is on the bottom. Gently remove the pan and place the plated cake layer in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Repeat this process with the second cake pan as well.

Once the cake layers and the frosting have finished cooling, place the bottom cake layer onto the display surface, (i.e. a cake stand or pretty plate that you will serve it off of), and begin evenly frosting the top of the bottom cake layer.

Then, center the second cake layer on top of the bottom cake layer so that they line up perfectly. Now frost the sides and top of the cake so that the entire cake surface is frosted and no cake surface is visible through the frosting. Take the remaining 1/2 cup of blueberries and arrange them on top of the cake. Serve immediately.

Discussion

SarahMae says:

Hey Eva! Can I snitch your blue velvet cake picture to use in my blog (I was going to plug your genius)? By the way, Im totally loving your cooking, and cant wait to get back to a kitchen to steal all of your ideas!-Sarah Lennox

So, I "stumbled" upon your blog and I LOVE IT. I'm starting to realllly get into cooking and baking, and when I saw this cake I said, "I WANT." SO I'm making this for Fourth of July! I can't wait! Thank you so much for the recipe!

Hi Eva! I have been gawking at this cake for weeks now and just finally made it. However, my cake layers turned out burnt on the outside. The top, bottom and sides are brown even though the inside is beautiful. I only baked it for about 30-35 min. Do you have any idea what might have gone wrong? I would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.

I tried to make a cupcake version of this, and it came out unfortunately play-dough like. I think I did something wrong. It wasn't holding the peaks you said it would even after I beat it for a long time. Do you think this had something to do with it?

Hi Catherine! Yes, you definitely need to wait until it makes peaks because that helps create the rigidity of the cake, which would explain why yours was mushier. It takes a reeeeaaallllllly long time to beat until the peaks form. I have a hand-held mix master and I kept having to switch arms because it was killing my tiny muscles. But be patient, it will eventually get stiff enough to hold a solid peak. Hope this helps!

This looks delicious! My boyfriend works at a camp called Camp Rainbow and they always have a staff bake off. We had the idea of making rainbow cup cakes, each row being a different color, but I think using this recipe to make them each TASTE different will help us win for sure!

I just stumbled upon this blog and this looks absolutely decadent! My parents have an annual Fourth of July party and I think I'm going to make a cake platter this year with slices of this cake, coconut cake and red velvet cake…

Also, we are having a Winter themed party around Christmas and this will be the perfect color combination for that!

I am strongly considering making this cake… it is absolutely beautiful! But I am confused … no butter in the cake? I've never made a cake without butter… how is this possible? I rushed to the store and got all the ingredients, came back home re read the recipe and started panicking when I realized there was no butter in the actual cake….

I just made this cake for a potluck for work, and it was a total hit! It did overcook a bit with 10 minutes still left on the timer, so I'll have to adjust the cooking time in the future. It still tasted AMAZING! And the syrup is extra good for pancakes later!

Perhaps I will adjust the timing in the recipe, I was always suspicious of the oven at my old apartment and the accuracy of its temperature reading. It had several breakdowns and sometimes if I made the same recipe twice it would take longer to cook on some occasions and less time on others. Thanks for the info 🙂

Lol- my boyfriend made blue velvet cake once (he's a David Lynch fan) and I learned a very valuable lesson about how my stomach reacts to large amounts of blue food coloring ;-P (And that it doesn't digest, making for hilarity later.)

The halves are cooling at the moment but unfortunately they're not very blue at all :/

More like pale greyish beige. I replaced the cream of tartar with baking powder. I could have us bicarbonate of soda but I can't imagine that making a difference colour wise! Perhaps I let a teeny bit of egg yolk into the mixture.

Oh well, it smells delicious! I also made the frosting blue for blue overload 🙂

@Louise: I am not sure if that would make a difference color-wise, but I don't see why it wouldn't be bright blue if you put all two ounces of food coloring into the cake mix. 2 ounces is an entire dropper container of blue food coloring. Did you divide the 2 ounces of blue food coloring between the frosting and the cake mix? If so, that might account for the less intense blue color of the cake mix part. Let me know 🙂

I just made this cake and the bottom half of both cakes came out hard… almost like gelatin. The top half is beautiful. I'm going to cut off that part and still make the cake. Do you have an idea of what I did wrong? Thanks.

You might not have whipped the egg whites enough, or you could have over beat them. After you add the cream of tartar, it usually takes about 10 minutes of beating to get the egg whites to the right stiffness where they will hold peaks and are relatively shiny. It also depends on the type of pan you are using. I just bought a new octagon-shaped cake pan, but the metal is thicker than a normal cake pan so it gets really hot and overcooks the outer rim of the cakes I have made with it 🙁 It is tough to say exactly what might have happened without being there, but those are my best guesses.

Eva, thanks so much. I will try this cake again and let you know how it turns out. I did end up cutting off the bottom half and iced the cake (wonderful icing by the way). It turned out very good! I'll let you know what happens the second go around!-Kendra

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i would've NEVER thought of this!! did you hear on that new show extreme chef this sunday they have to make rattlesnake for breakfast?? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3J824ZuGXA sounds right up your alley LOL 😉

I really want to make this! I am thinking either the 4th of July or to celebrate the birth of our baby boy in July 🙂 I am trying to avoid artificial colors and sweeteners these days…any natural blue coloring ideas? Have you ever tried making it without the food coloring? Maybe the blueberries would give it enough color? I just don't want it to look gray.

Aww, congratulations on your coming son! I know red beets can be used to dye eggs blue during Easter, but I am not sure if it would work with a cake. If you wanted to try it, you could boil the beets in water for an hour with a teeny bit of vinegar, then remove the beats and continue boiling the water until it boils down a lot and more of the water evaporates so that the dye is very concentrated. Then add the dye to the cake. I am not sure exactly how much you would need to add, but adding too much would probably affect the stability of the cake. Blueberries can be used as a natural dye, but it would make the cake purple, not blue. Best of luck with your natural dye attempt 🙂

just made this for my birthday (yes, I took the birthday bull by the horns) and then got sick before I had a chance to eat/taste it….but I'm told it was delicious, it was gorgeous and I added some silver sugar sprinkles on top for a little bling. I'll be making it again soon and might just NOT share.

I just tried to make this cake, but it barely made enough to fill half a 9" cake pan, much less two of them. I double-triple-quadruple checked to make sure I had all the quantities correct, and I'm baffled.

@Knickerbocker: You probably didn't beat the egg whites long enough. When air is whipped into the protein of the egg whites they expand and become bigger and flufflier, which makes the batter bigger and fluffier when you mix in the other ingredients.

I'm not sure what I did wrong!!! I love the look of this cake! The first time I tried to make it I could NOT get the egg whites to peak!!! So I went and got MORE eggs and STILL couldnt get it to work… then I went and BOUGHT egg whites and it stiffened a little better… maybe I wasnt patient enough….idk…the cake only took FIFTEEN minutes to cook! And I was cooking at 375 degrees… the cake was tough and didnt rise well. 🙁 I wanted this cake to work SO baddd!!! Help! I used ALL purpose flour…is there a difference between that and CAKE flour???

Egg whites are very tempermental, if you separate the whites yourself and even get a bit of the yolk in it it can affect how well they will be able to stiffen. And yes, cake flour is different from all purpose flour. It is much finer, kind of like the difference between normal sugar and powdered sugar but not as extreme. Basically cake flour makes cake fluffier and lighter in texture, which explains the texture of your cake.

Ahhhhh…. I looked alll in my grocery store and they didnt have "cake flour". 🙁 They had other flours….like "bread flour" and "baker's flour", but not "cake". :/ I baked the cake twice! haha and I read in an above comment that you posted that it takes about TEN minutes of beating the eggs! I'm new at this baking thing so I wasnt sure what I was looking for! I'll try it again with different flour next time and I'll beat the egg whites longer! 🙂 The cream cheese icing and blue-berry syrup turned out GREAT though!

Glad the rest turned out well for you 🙂 Yeah cake flour can be kind of tricky to find if you've never used it before. It is actually in a box, not in a bag, and is usually closer to the boxed cake mixes than the flours, which is confusing. But I recommend Swan's brand for cake flour, they've never let me down 🙂

It sounds like you might have mixed the dry ingredients in instead of folding them in. Folding them in helps keep the air bubbles nice and poofy, stirring them in or folding them in incorrectly pops and deflates the bubbles, which may explain your flat cake problem. There is a helpful article on how to fold things into egg whites here: http://www.ochef.com/241.htm

Working with egg whites in a cake is very temperamental and can definitely be frustrating, (trust me, I have had many a difficult time with meringues and angel food), but when it turns out that light angel food cake texture is just wonderful.

Aloha! This cake looks amazing and a friend has asked me to make it for her birthday; I'm very excited about it; but I have a question about the blueberries – do they HAVE to be fresh not frozen? Living on an island means a lot of fruits are considered "specialty" since they have to be flown in and when I can find them, they're pretty expensive! I always try to get fresh foods whenever possible but this cake uses a lot of blueberries. It will easily run me $15 -$20 for the amount I need. Do you think it would work if I rinsed the frozen berries REALLY well? At least for the syrup? Mahalo! (Thank you.)

Yes it would be fine. For the cake, just make sure to defrost them in a strainer so that the excess liquid can drip out so the cake doesn't get too watery from them. For the syrup, it should be totally fine defrosted any way you want 🙂

instead of useing food coloring couldn't we just use blueberry juice from frozen blueberries? would make it nice and blue as well and it well be much more healthier. :)i'll try it that's for sure. mom has cancer and she can't eat anything with food coloring.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother, you could definitely use blueberry juice but it would turn the cake a more purple shade than blue. Also you would need a higher amount of liquid than you would with food coloring because food coloring is more concentrated, so it might make the cake more watery and affect the chemistry of the cake depending on how much you put in, so I'd be careful about adding too much. Maybe just 2 ounces of juice or so for a nice lavender color?

Just a funny sidenote. When I was young my Mother was very cautious about using red food color so she used blue in a red velvet cake instead. Needless to say, the next day we all had blue poo! hahaha… Bakers beware!

heads up AUSSIES! I have just made the cake in Australia and thought I'd post up the converted measurements for anyone else that wants to make it!! Hope that's okay with you Eva!-Oven at 190deg celcius (170 for fan forced) time was perfect on 30 min-1 1/4 cake flour is the equivalent of a 1 cup measure with 2 tablespoons corn flour in the bottom then filled to the top with plain flour – do again with a quarter cup – starting with 2 teaspoons of corn flour then filling with plain-2 oz. blue food colouring is 59mls but if you buy a bottle of 50ml blue "queen" brand colouring it works perfectly-16 oz of cream cheese is 450g-10 tablespoons of butter is 150g-if you buy a 250g punnet of blueberries from the supermarket thats one cup. I only put in the one cup and it worked fine. (I'm actually considering leaving them out next time, not because it wasn't good but because here they are a) hard to find and b)freaking expensive – same reason I didn't make the sauce!!)Great recipe though Eva I really enjoyed it and have posted it on my blog – with the aussie variations and linked it back to you!Thanks!! 🙂

So, I saw this recipe on pinterest and it looked so amazing I had to try it. The biggest problem I encountered was finding blue food coloring, go figure. After going to 3 grocery stores I finally got my smarts and visited the local party/cake shop. They only carried the gel food coloring paste. So I got it and immediately went home and began baking. The icing is absolutely divine and my cake looks wonderful. I can't comment on the taste as I am taking it into work to share but there is no way it can't taste as good as it looks. Thanks for a great recipe that I will be making over & over again. Oh by the way I did use metal cake pans and set the timer for 20 minutes to start checking it because I read other comments that some had problems with it getting dark on the bottom and sides. My cake was completely cooked in 20 was not dark and did not stick. SUCCESS!!!

I burnt the edges using metal cake pans and the cream cheese taste is really strong in the icing, but I tried my very best and can't wait to taste it on Sunday! My stepson and I used this recipe for the fellers' cake bake for our upcoming cub scout meeting. It's my first cake from scratch :/ Thanks for the recipe and your hard work putting this page together!

No problem, I'm sorry the edges came out too crispy for you though! You can always try to cut the burnt part off with a long bread knife before frosting and layering the cake, nobody eating it would know the difference 😉

I made this not too long ago and love love loved it. I want to make it again but will be on a time crunch. I was wondering what your thoughts are on using a boxed Angel Food cake mix with the added cocoa, blueberries, and food coloring.

Hi Eva! I'm a novice baker and would like to try your recipe using a boxed Angel Food cake as well. Do you recommend a certain brand? And what did you mean when you said the egg whites needed to be beat properly? I hope my attempt at making it turns out well enough so I can bring it to a 4th of July party. Thanks so much!

Hi Chelsea! I like Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes but any brand should be fine 🙂 By beating the egg whites properly, I mean they need to be beaten just until they hold a stiff peak, and should not be beaten any longer after that point. But make sure you follow the instructions on the boxed cake mix that you end up using, in case they want a different number of eggs or not only egg whites. Good luck with the boxed mix, let me know how it turns out!

Thanks! I made it and it still came out nice and fluffy! I tasted a little piece when I cut it to flatten it a bit, and it's delicious!

I had a bit of a duh moment when I tried to mix food coloring to make blue, and it ended up green! Haha but I'm making it for my friend who loves red velvet cake and blueberries bc he just got a new job, so I'll tell him it's green for all the money he'll be making 😉 thanks again for this recipe! I can't wait to frost it!!

hi eva! i saw this on pinterest and immediately repinned it! unfortunately, i tried making it the next day and i messed up while making trying to beat the eggs white together with the other ingredients…my soft peaks were not forming at all. it stayed liquid.i'm still new at baking so i'm not sure what happened. i used egg whites from a carton and measured out 11 eggs…would that be the mistake? should i have used real eggs and separated the whites?i want to try to make this recipe again but i want to do it right this time!

Hello! I am very glad you tried it and very sorry that you had a difficult time with the peaks. You know, I have never tried cooking with egg whites from a carton so I am not familiar with their effect personally, but after reading this article here http://www.ochef.com/1329.htm it sounds like the pasteurization process that most pre-packaged egg whites go through makes it more difficult for them to form and hold peaks, so you are likely correct in that the pre-packaged egg whites were what was making your peaks so darn stubborn. And when you are mixing in the flour mixture, make sure to fold it in correctly so all the air bubbles you spent so much time tending to don't pop and make the cake flat. This is a solid tutorial on how to fold egg white batters to keep the batters' fluffiness: http://www.ochef.com/241.htm hope this helps!

I found this link on pinterest, and immediately knew I had to make it! Took me a bit to get all the ingredients together (and I still managed to forget a second package of cream cheese -.-) but I finally got it all together! I was only able to make half a recipe of frosting but it worked out fine. I made my entire family try a piece and everyone loved it! I will be making another one tomorrow. This is seriously the best cake ever!! Thanks :o)

Love the cake! It worked out perfectly for my camp half blood class, where blue food is a must! The kids loved that their mouths were blus after one bite! LOL! I may have a more cocentrated food coloring, I will try with les next time. thanks for sharing!

My daughter 16 birthday is this weekend and since she is not into big sweet 16 parties she said " MOM since it is my special birthday I want a special cake for that day and bammmmm, I want this cake for my 16 birthday" ME (MOM) well it looks easy but I'm not a baker so help me God hope this turns out as expected 🙂 I will keep u posted with the results =)